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Abit IP35 Pro Socket 775 Motherboard

Closer Look:

The appealing blue color of the IP35-E and IP35 caries through onto the top of the line IP35 Pro. One item that stands out from the others in the companies P35 lineup is the heatpipe cooling that captures both of the chipsets and the power regulation circuits. Additional cooling strips are evident on the bottom of the board and serve as extra cooling capacity for the power regulation circuits. With this board being the top dog in the series you would expect it to be a feature rich board. It is that and more. A quick view of the I/O area shows that this board has items that its lesser features brethren lack. These items include dual E-SATA ports, dual gigabit lan, and s/pdif in and out.

This board features two 16x PCI-E, three PCI and one 1x PCI-E slot to take care of your expansion needs. The two 16x PCI-E slots are great if you will be using dual GPU's. This board not only has 4 USB ports on the I/O panel, but the ability to add eight more via headers on the bottom of the board. Additional options include the firewire header and HDMI sound header to use with HDMI ready video cards. Here we see it hidden behind the front panel audio header.

Each of the chipsets and the power regulation circuit for the CPU are covered with an all-in-one, heatpipe-style cooling assembly. The heatpipe assembly features silent-OTES technology to help dissipate the heat generated by these components

A couple of features that are really nice to have are incorporated right into this board. Easily the coolest feature on this board is the E-ZCmos reset button on the rear I/O panel just under the P/S2 ports. This allows for a quick cmos reset if you push your hardware that little bit to far. Now no more opening the case to dig for the jumper. If it becomes necessary, the jumper is in an easy to reach position at the bottom right hand side of the board, too. A couple of other features are equally nice. The on-board diagnostic LED and on-board reset and power switches are nice if you run your equipment on a test station instead of a case.

All of the SATA, IDE and floppy connections are conveniently located on the bottom right corner of the board for easy access. This board uses 100% Japanese built, solid state capacitors.